'Appointment in Samarra' by John O'Hara

With a dazzling new cover and smart new introduction, one of my favorite novels, "Appointment in Samarra" by John O'Hara, is reborn.

Before some of you head back to school and read assignments of Ernest Hemingway, William Faulkner and F. Scott Fitzgerald, read O'Hara, who worked in their shadow.

Who knows why some wonderful novels fail to endure in the public imagination? Perhaps it was that by the standards of 1934 readers found the sexual frankness of "Appointment in Samarra" appalling — especially the depiction of women in this context.

With this handsome new edition, let's bring this novel — O'Hara's first — back into the conversation. In his wonderful introduction, Charles McGrath, a writer at large for The New York Times who has held high editing positions at The New York Times Book Review and The New Yorker, not only makes the case for this overlooked novel but provides a context for reading it.

Set in a fictional Pennsylvania town during Prohibition, the novel focuses on a married couple at the center of the town's social elite. The book is set in the first year of the Great Depression as a man of great privilege self-destructs. Through it all, McGrath wisely points out, O'Hara retains his sympathy with this character, resisting the temptation to lampoon or satirize him.

And did I mention that this novel about class, drinking and sex is fun — and incredibly smart? McGrath has the last word on O'Hara: "He studied class indicators — clothes, college slang, fraternity pins and handshakes, membership lists — the way the Duc de Saint-Simon studied the rituals and pecking order at the court of Louis Quatorze."

You can learn more about John O'Hara and his oeuvre in Rick Kogan's literary saloon column in the July 28 Printers Row Journal.